I got you in a Stranglehold baybee! (John Galt remix)

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

John Galt is alive and well and living in Connecticut. And he will be voting for Republican Linda McMahon for the U.S. Senate, if her reception by beleaguered taxpayers during a recent round of campaign tours is an indication. Or he may very well be Linda McMahon, judging by those who oppose her. The government bureaucrats, the political, media and academic elites [Republican Elites like Ann Coulter - A_J] aligned against her, are one with those who fought the fictional hero who defied "a collectivist system" marked by the "utter incompetence" of those in "governmental power" in Ayn Rand's classic, Atlas Shrugged.

Who is John Galt? That's the question asked throughout the book, growing since its publication in 1957 to a generalized rallying cry against, as the Wall Street Journal has put it, the "economic carnage caused by big government run amok."

...

Bill Sbona, owner of Central News in downtown Middletown, expressed the growing anger during McMahon's recent tour of Connecticut: "Why should I work another four hours to pay for someone else's health care or mortgage? The government keeps taking from us." He glanced at McMahon exiting his store. "She knows what it's like to have to live under this."

Nick Lisitano, a 38-year veteran of the aeronautics industry, agreed. "She's built a business, not just taken from us." The government keeps taking, the politicians keep "ramming things down our throats," they agreed, a recurring theme on Main Street, and not just in central Connecticut.

...

But now, in historically Democratic Connecticut, Atlas has shrugged, where contempt for a political class has crystallized into the determination of taxpayers to rid themselves of career politicians. They started with the view expressed to pollsters that it is "time to kick Chris Dodd out of [the] Senate." Suddenly, corruption wasn't cool. Like his father, who was thrown out of office by voters after censure by the U.S. Senate, Dodd used his position to line his own pockets and funnel taxpayer money to a host of corporate and special interests. In return, they provided him with such Washington perks as a below-market mortgage and a vacation home on ten acres of Irish countryside, courtesy of the felon for whom the influential senator had obtained a pardon. Dodd, a career politician whose last shot at consumers and business was sponsorship of a finance bill that dramatically expands government, has come to symbolize the corruption and "very acts of economic lunacy" which, a Wall Street Journal senior economics writer noted, Rand portrayed in a work of fiction that, nearly forty years later, the Library of Congress found to be the second-most influential book in the lives of Americans. The Bible was first.

Enter Linda McMahon, who, like John Galt, stepped out of a high-profile job in private industry to fight against what the Wall Street Journal described as the "relentless wealth redistributionists and their programs" making everyone poorer. She put it this way to American Thinker during her recent tour of the state: "I looked at my grandchildren and realized that someone has to stop the nonsense, those who are robbing them of their future." Her four grandchildren have been born into a "wonderful country" that government "is dismantling."

And so McMahon stepped down as Chief Executive Officer of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), the $1.1-billion entertainment juggernaut built with her husband. Her goal: Apply the operating and marketing savvy she used to build a profitable business to a government that has been left too long to beltway politicians such as Dodd, her primary opponent (former Republican Representative Rob Simmons), and the Democratic attorney general of the state now in the running for senate. (Richard Blumenthal is a career politician whose best friend and "political twin" was the disgraced former governor and attorney general of neighboring New York, Elliot Spitzer.)

...

One of the Times columnists who attacked, David Brooks, is blunt in his preference for professionals with "superior abilities to organize society" through "central regulations" -- just the kind of people brought into government by Barack Obama, he wrote admiringly, and valued by the career politicians regularly sent to Washington by Connecticut.

[The Ruling Class (American Spectator)
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the ]

But the 61-year-old executive remains unruffled. Let them attack, McMahon said, "because Washington needs people who don't want to spend their lives in Washington, who have a life." Outside of Tschudin Chocolates, a spectator shook her head as she watched McMahon with the owner. "She's really like a normal person."

It was Linda McMahon making her way along Main Street in Middletown. But it could have been John Galt or Ronald Reagan ignoring the ninety-degree sun baking the sidewalk, talking about "oppressive bureaucracy" and "stifling government," intent on a single message: We don't work for government...it works for us. Her smile was quiet, but her words were loud: "Let's stop them."

Stuart Schwartz
The American Thinker
__________________
The Firespin Remix
If you think it is acceptable to take a percentage of someone's income above your station in life, then everyone below your station in life will find it perfectly acceptable, even righteous to take like amount from you, while the people above your station in life whom you helped loot won't have much of a problem with it either.
A_J, the Stupid

 

[Songcatcher]

The white people are the minority on this planet.

Side issue.

 

[Byron In Exile]

Stuart Schwartz
The American Thinker

 

[doctor_insanus]

Who John Galt Isn’t

It was the "o” what did it, three swirling red crests with the vertiginous rabbit-hole center fading into white that hypnotized my attention and coaxed my bike tire left so that I nearly grazed the back wheel of a BMW. It was an encounter I would have lost, surely, and it surely would have been my fault, though I’m confident the owner was selfish and had no interest in looking out for my interests.

The bumper sticker was affixed with tape or static cling to the back windshield, hovering just below eye level. “Socialism Didn’t Work Last Time Either,” only instead of the “o” in “Socialism,” some wag had substituted the Obama “o”. One immutable law of rhetoric is that digs don’t need to be accurate to make their point. But as the BMW shifted gears and drag-raced past me, a second bumper sticker appeared, balancing the first like a convex diptych, secured in the other far corner of the back windshield, written in a cleaner sparer font than the fat white letters of “Socialism.”

“Who is John Galt?” Who, indeed.

The allusion, of course, was Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a manifesto (or apologia) for capitalism unbound. Galt is the Prometheus of productivity, a dynamo whose fiery ideas would ignite the economy if not for the vulture bureaucrats. When Galt (among others) withdraws from society in the book and refuses to offer his liver to the body politic, the vultures panic, and society teeters on collapse. The lesson—practically spelled out in italics—is that a few brilliants like Galt drive mankind forward, and any constraints on their activities impoverishes all. Sporting a Galt bumper sticker ensures that you can take a moralistic stand without having to actually do anything.

I’m going to leave aside here the dubious taste of anyone who’d admit they read and liked Rand. If you plotted Literary Merit on the x-axis versus Book Sales on the y-axis, the slope of the line for Rand’s oeuvre would be undefined, a perfect vertical up and down. She’s atrocious with dialogue, unconvincing with sex, clumsy with pacing, heavy-handed with foreshadowing, lousy with clichés. (I’d add character development if she included any human beings in her stories.) I’m embarrassed for her, and she died in 1982.

What Rand does have is conviction, utter conviction, conviction saturating every comma and period. To her credit, she does summon up a unique world—only we happen to live, now, in an era antithetical to her vision, and have a president who disagrees on one or two or a thousand particulars. (Though who, ironically, wrenched himself from obscurity through sheer will in a way that you rarely read about outside of Rand or Horatio Alger.) According to The Economist, sales of Rand books spiked recently in the teeth of Obama’s various reforms, economic gooses, and stimuli, making her decades-old books bestsellers all over again. No one feels moved to scrawl “Frodo lives!” on walls anymore. It’s “Who is John Galt?”

Rand defines herself against all forms of collectivism, but she and her acolytes don’t, can’t, acknowledge that her philosophy, sneakily named Objectivism (talk about seizing the rhetorical high ground!), has one important chromosome in common with socialism. Socialism failed—and by “socialism” here I mean hard-core socialism, the kind tried and found wanting in the USSR and GDR, not the European democratic socialism that Obama does seem intent on introducing here—but hard-core socialism failed because it’s a fantasy. It’s nonsense to think that human beings will learn to share their possessions for the common good, and it’s nonsense to think that wars and greed and stomach aches will all cease once the government levels and razes all sign of status. We’ve always had the poor and we’re always going to have them. Charity can help; but however nice it sounds to outlaw poverty, it ain’t going to work.

That said, at least Karl Marx had the analytical talent to write a non-fictional and occasionally penetrating analysis of the capitalistic worldview. Socialism is largely fantasy, but Galt and his ilk in the gulch are pure, unadulterated fantasy: They appear in a novel. How, how, how can someone condemn socialism as the paragon of a nice-sounding but dangerous policy and yet simultaneously cite what’s more or less an economic Passion Play as the embodiment of a rational, level-headed, natural order? For Christ’s sake, even Alan Greenspan has disabused himself, and no one drank more Rand-flavored Kool-Aid.

Okay. At this point, I have to confuse things by making a small admission. As long as I’m not forced to read her actual writing, I’m kinda sorta sympathetic with Rand. Instinctively, I’m a squishy libertarian—Nudge was written exactly for me—and I do find Rand’s portrayals (again, as long as I’m just reading about them on Wikipedia) of the jealous empty parasites who do seem to get on and get ahead in this stupid world hilarious in a bitterly hard-won way. The Salieris who “couldn’t be, and know it.” But I recognize when I’m fantasizing about a new world order. I fully admit I would do a really, really bad job heading up any enterprise of any size larger than about two-point-five people; if it was a business, we’d declare insolvency within hours. I’m under no delusions that I’m who John Galt is.

Rarely for her time, Rand rightly judged that Fascism and Socialism were more or less equivalent, with the far right and far left wrapping around the political continuum and swallowing each other. But what Rand and her acolytes seem unable to grasp is that the cronyism, successful gamesmanship, and lack of scruples that she deplores in those systems aren’t products of collectivism. They’re products of human beings. The mental Lilliputians often win out in Rand’s horrorlands, but they’d win out in her fantasylands just the same. In fact without the restraining hand of at least a tiny bit of government, the forces Rand despised would gain even more naked power. They wouldn’t suddenly let Galt and his gulch-mates be. They’d invade, they’d rape, they’d raze. Some governments are superior to others and some do induce better behavior; let’s not kind ourselves on that. But let’s not kid ourselves here, either: When people suck, it’s usually because that’s what people are like.

To answer the question in the BMW window, since I couldn’t pedal fast enough. Who is John Galt? No one who ever has, or ever can, exist.

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/08/who-john-galt-isnt.html

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

The title sucked up all my creative juice...

 

[rosco rathbone]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRjGX3jYFYk


Shitty tone.

 

[Saint Peter]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRjGX3jYFYk


Shitty tone.

Shitty tone is quite the understatement.